Two days later again, the whole thing was repeated.
“But it’s so trivial!” the young clergyman exclaimed, bewildered. “That’s what I can’t understand. Why should you tell trivial, childish fibs like that? There’s no object in it, that I can see.”
But in a little while, good Mr. Perriman became aware in himself of an uneasy suspicion. He began to cut Cecil’s confessions short.
“There, there, my dear boy, that’ll do. Leave it at that. I told you I didn’t want details. You must pull yourself together. There is something almost—abject—in owning freely to this lack of moral backbone, and never summing up resolution to defeat it. And although I’m always ready to give you any help in my power, I don’t want you to get into the way of looking upon your admissions to me as a sort of automatic salve to your conscience, you know.”
The light died out of Cecil’s eyes, and he went quietly away.
The young master felt thoroughly uneasy.
Against his own will, and in defiance of what he innocently thought of to himself as the laws of Nature, he was beginning to feel, rather than to know, that Cecil’s later confessions were not quite genuine ones.
“It’s—it’s almost as though he were trying to keep it up,” Perriman reflected, bewildered and almost disgusted.
At last he told Cecil that he thought the confessions had better cease. “If you would feel it useful to you to give me a general account of your progress, well and good. But I—I really think it would be better not to dwell on your own folly and weakness by giving me a long account of each lapse from the truth, Aviolet. Do try and be more robust about it all, won’t you?”
Cecil winced as though he had been struck, and Perriman felt that he was being brutal.